A Durable Peace (29 page)

The bashing that Israel received in the media was particularly instructive, given that next to nothing was said, either now
or at the time, about the way the
Arab
governments of Jordan and Egypt had put down their intifadas in these very territories before 1967. We can, for instance,
compare the actions taken by the Israeli military to that of the Jordanian Legion during the period when Jordan was the occupying
power in the West Bank (which it had invaded in 1948 and illegally annexed in 1950). In October 1954, Beirut radio reported
the outbreak of riots and demonstrations in Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, and Jordanian-held Jerusalem. The army was called in,
and a state of emergency was declared. The official Jordanian announcement said that fourteen were killed and 117 injured.
Unofficial media reports claimed that ninety were killed.
⁵⁹
In April 1957, riots in Jerusalem and Ramallah led King Hussein to resort to emergency measures: A curfew was imposed on
Jerusalem and Ramallah, newspapers were closed, municipal councils were dismissed in Bethlehem, Nablus,
Tulkarm, and Jenin, and there were widespread arrests, including 169 UN teachers.
⁶⁰
In April 1963 in Jerusalem, eleven were killed, 150 wounded (including seventeen schoolgirls); in Ramallah one person was
killed and thirty-five were wounded; in Jenin and Irbid dozens more were wounded; 120 politicians were arrested.
⁶¹
On November 19, 1966, riots broke out in Nablus and Hebron and police opened fire into the crowds. The next day tanks were
brought in and opened fire. Fifty were killed or wounded in Nablus alone. More were killed at the funerals.
⁶²

Similar treatment was accorded the residents of Gaza by the Egyptian army. In fairness, it should be noted that Jordan had
at least given most of the Palestinian Arabs Jordanian citizenship. But Egypt refused them even this elementary amenity, deliberately
keeping the entire population of Gaza in a humiliating condition of statelessness, almost half of them as passportless refugees.

With such summary treatment, it is not surprising that none of these intifadas lasted very long or amounted to very much.
For the Jordanians and the Egyptians were willing to resort to means of “restoring order” in the territories that Israel would
never dream of using—the Israeli army did not roll tanks in front of crowds and fire away. But the Jordanian Legion was free
from such restraint: Its soldiers used not rubber bullets but lead ones. Nor were they under orders to fire only when their
lives were in danger. If Israel had used the Jordanian methods, casualties would have climbed to twenty-five or fifty
per day
rather than the much smaller rate that did result from mass encounters with the IDF. In all likelihood, Israel’s intifada
would have died the same quick and bloody death as did its precursors under Arab regimes. But Israel, of course, was unprepared
to adopt such methods, knowingly prolonging the intifada and taking upon itself punishing political costs (including claims
about the inhumanity and depravity of Israeli methods) in order to avoid the use of uninhibited force.

When such a comparison is raised, Western diplomats and journalists commonly respond by claiming that Israel must be
held to a higher standard than the Arab dictatorships. True enough. Undoubtedly a democracy should be judged by the standards
of democracies. Indeed, during the years of the intifada several violent outbreaks occurred in democratic countries, the most
noteworthy in Venezuela and India. In Venezuela, in two days of rioting in 1987, the government put down the violence with
a toll of 119 dead and 800 wounded, while in India during the ten-day siege of the Golden Temple, 133 people died in clashes
between secessionist Sikhs and the government.
⁶³
(These were greater than the number killed in a full
year
of intifada confrontations with the IDF.) When violent looting, the stoning of vehicles, or the firebombing of shops occurs
in a democracy, it must take forceful action, since the first obligation of government—of any government—is to keep the peace.
When such rioting occurred in America’s major cities in the mid-1960s, the death toll in eruptions of rioting lasting only
a few days was thirty-four in Los Angeles, twenty-six in Newark, forty-three in Detroit, and scores of others elsewhere. Tens
of thousands were arrested. When renewed rioting in 1968 hit 125 cities, the American government had no choice but to apply
massive force: 55,000 soldiers and policemen were brought in to quell the disturbances. In all, forty-six were killed and
over 21,000 arrested.
⁶⁴
Lest anyone believe that these explosions were a thing of the past, rioting in Los Angeles in May 1992 left fifty-one dead
in three days—and resulted in widespread criticism of the Los Angeles police for not having responded with
enough
force.

Not only rioting but stone-throwing has its parallels in other countries. In 1991, two Maryland teenagers were caught hurling
rocks at passing cars, sending a fifteen-year-old girl who was a passenger in one car into a coma. (In the territories several
Jewish passengers have lost their lives and others have been crippled for life by rocks hurled through the windshields of
their vehicles.) Although the average person in the West is not accustomed to thinking in such terms, a rock the size of a
baseball hurled into a car traveling at sixty miles per hour is a weapon at least as deadly as a
knife or an ax. The offenders in Maryland were charged with ninety counts, including “assault with intent to murder, assault
with intent to maim, assault with intent to disable, assault and battery, and malicious destruction of property.” They were
sentenced to five hundred years in prison, assuring that they will spend the rest of their adult lives behind bars.
⁶⁵
The “harsh” military administration in Judea and Samaria naturally insists on similar penalties, though it should be pointed
out that the penalty for those rock throwers who do
not
succeed in inflicting substantial damage is a modest fine.

That Israel was not judged according to these international norms indicates that there is not a double standard at work, but
a
triple
one—one standard for the Arab dictatorships, a second for the democracies, and still a third—separate and special—for Israel.
This third standard rests on the oft-repeated assumption that Israel is morally wrong
to be in the territories at all,
and that its every act there is therefore a derivative wrong. Based on this premise, the Israeli army is held to be wrong
in its every use of force, no matter how restrained or proportional, no matter how necessary. It is a standard against which
no country can possibly be judged favorably, and as such it has been used with consummate skill by Arab propagandists to demonize
Israel during the intifada riots, obliterating for many both the history and causality of the Arab-Israeli conflict. For like
the Arab campaign of international terrorism before it, the intifada’s purpose soon evolved to serve as a stage in the PLO’s
media war against Israel. After the first weeks of spontaneous rioting, the intifada’s “main events” were increasingly calculated
purely from manipulating public opinion: the use of crowds of children in confrontations, the staging of riots for the press,
the orders against the use of firearms, the prominent display of English-speaking Palestinian advocates of “civil disobedience,”
the silencing of dissent which might harm the image of “unity”—all combined with the PLO’s pronouncements that no one had
the power to stop the intifada, and that only a Palestinian state (under its rule) could end the violence by
giving the Palestinian people in the “Israeli-occupied West Bank” their just deserts, i.e., self-determination. (Some correspondents
obligingly explained that the “Palestinian people” had been “occupied for centuries” by the Byzantines, the Turks, the British,
and the Israelis and were now “finally” prepared to seize their destiny and their independence.)

Despite the decline in the widespread rioting that characterized the beginning of the intifada, the years of bombardment by
the carefully crafted Arab media blitz took their toll, and in the minds of many in the West the Reversal of Causality is
now an established fact. For them, it is clear that the Israelis have dispossessed and oppressed the Palestinian people. After
all, they saw them doing it on television.

But no matter how potent the intifada has been as a stage for political and journalistic attacks against Israel, it had a
limited media-life and therefore limited political usefulness. The campaign against Israel’s “usurpation” of Palestinian self-determination
therefore focused on another controversy between Israel and the Arabs: the settlements. These, at least, had the benefit of
not going away. They could be brought up again and again as proof of Israel’s continuing efforts to “steal” the land away
from its rightful owners, the Palestinians. And they had the added benefit of being opposed by a faction within Israel itself
that agitated for a curtailment of settlement activity.

The right of Jews to live in Hebron, Nablus, and East Jerusalem (that is, the “West Bank”) was recognized by the nations of
the world at the same time as the right of Jews to live in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and West Jerusalem—in the Balfour Declaration,
the Treaty of Versailles, and the League of Nations Mandate. At the time there was no such thing as the West Bank, and no
one had ever suggested that Samaria and Judea could somehow be distinguished from the rest of Palestine, certainly not from
western Palestine. On the contrary, Judea and Samaria were the very heart of the land, in which virtually every event of importance
in pre-exilic Jewish history
took place: Elon Moreh, where Abraham was promised the land, and Hebron, where he buried Sarah; Beth El, where Jacob dreamed
of the ladder to heaven, and Bethlehem, where he buried Rachel; Jericho, where Joshua entered the land, and Shechem (Nablus),
where he read the people the law and buried Joseph; Shiloh, which housed the tabernacle and served as the center of the Jewish
people for four centuries before Jerusalem; Beth Horon, where the Maccabees defeated the Seleucids; and Betar, where the second
great Jewish revolt against Rome was finally crushed. Above all, there was the Old City of Jerusalem (today, “East Jerusalem”),
the physical Zion of the Jews, the heart and breath of the Jewish people since the time of David and the prophets, and the
center of its spiritual and political aspirations. At Versailles, when the Zionists claimed Palestine and when Wilson, Lloyd
George, and Clemenceau recognized the claim, it was places such as these of which they thought above all others.

Hence it comes as no surprise that Jewish immigrants chose to come to these places during the period of the British Mandate.
In Jerusalem and Hebron there were already large Jewish communities that were joined by new immigrants, and the immigrants
founded new ones as well; Kalia and Beit Ha’arava in the Jordan River Valley; Atarot and Neve Ya’akov in Samaria; Ein Tzurim,
Re-vadim, Massuot Yitzhak, Kfar Etzion, and Ramat Rachel in Judea; and Kfar Darom in Gaza. All of these “West Bank settlements”
were founded before there was such a thing as a “West Bank,” and no one knew that they were different from any of the other
Jewish villages and towns sprouting all over western Palestine. No one questioned the right of Jews to live in any of these
places—except for those who rejected the right of Jews to live anywhere in the land at all.

Any fair-minded observer must be moved to ask: If the right of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria was recognized by the League
of Nations and was undisputed by most of the international community when Jewish communities were being founded there before
the establishment of Israel, just when did Jews
lose
the right to live in these places?

In fact, they never did lose that right—only the practical ability to exercise it. The disappearance of that capacity can
be dated to Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. The Jordanian Legion of King Abdullah crossed the Jordan River unprovoked
and uninvited and seized Judea, Samaria, and the eastern reaches of Jerusalem (including the Old City, with its ancient Jewish
community). Everywhere the Jordanians came, they destroyed what they could of the Jewish presence. In East Jerusalem, the
Jewish quarter was almost completely leveled by the invading Jordanians. Thousands of Jews were expelled from their homes,
synagogues destroyed, and Jewish cemeteries desecrated.
^*
The Jewish settlers of Kfar Etzion were not so lucky. Their attempts to raise a white flag and surrender were ignored, and
the Jordanians kept firing until they had killed 240 people. The communities themselves were destroyed and abandoned.

In 1950, Abdullah formally annexed what he now called the “West Bank” to Jordan. This was so obviously the spoils of an illegal
and aggressive war that only two countries, Britain and Pakistan, ever recognized the annexation. In 1954, a year after Hussein
succeeded to the throne, Jordan formally promulgated the law prohibiting Jews from living there—a law which is on the books
to this day. And while the 1949 armistice agreement with Israel stipulated that Jews should be allowed into Jordanian-held
Jerusalem to visit their holy sites, the agreement was systematically violated to prevent Jews from entering the kingdom.

When Jordan seized the West Bank in 1948, it captured land
that was almost entirely empty. Outside of the small urban centers such as Shechem (Nablus), Hebron, Ramallah, and Bethlehem,
there was a scattering of villages along the crude roads connecting them, and an occasional Bedouin farther afield. The Jordanian
government took direct control of most of the open space and for the nineteen years of Jordanian control made virtually no
effort to develop it. Hussein’s policy was to develop the East Bank alone, and he in fact was successful in moving what little
industry there had been on the West Bank before 1948 across to the other side of the Jordan River.